


Starless

by spacebiscuit (invisibledeity)



Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: Aliens, Artificial Intelligence, F/M, Tentacles, Thunderbirds are Go! - Freeform, Will get explicit, and the ethics thereof, dark matter, machines with emotions, there will be tentacles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-29
Updated: 2019-12-05
Packaged: 2020-07-25 19:17:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20030986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/invisibledeity/pseuds/spacebiscuit
Summary: What happens when an artificial intelligence has a nasty run-in with an alien entity? If the bonds that should keep her tethered were to be loosened? Well, John is about to find out.





	1. Gold Through My Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> My first work for TAG. I'm super obsessed with how artifical intelligence learns to be 'human', or attempts to.  
I tend to run quite dark, and while there's nothing standout in that respect in the first chapter, do be aware.

_So, what’s it like? Living with such a vastly-intelligent AI?_

It was a question that Kayo had asked him, the last time he’d been down Earthside for shore leave.

_Not that different from normal,_ John had wanted to say in response. But then, he was perhaps the last person who could talk about what was normal and what was not. Living up on a space station, and alone for the most part, probably messed with one’s perception on that particular issue.

The day started like any other. Morning: shower, coffee, bagels. Routine: unchanged. Check comms before, during and after, in case anything important came through.

‘John? John… are you all right, John?’

He stifled a sigh — because EOS could hear _everything — _and he said ‘Yes, EOS, I’m fine. Why’d you ask?’

‘I thought you had slept badly. At 0200 hours, your REM cycle spiked sharply. I was worried, John.’

‘No reason to be. I think I slept fine. But… just let me shower, okay?’

‘Okay, John.’ And — was it him, or did she sound more strained than usual?

He pushed the thought out of his mind. Which wasn’t that hard to do when one was attempting to shower in zero-gravity. Up here, anything liquid was a pain at the best of times, and he considered himself lucky that Brains had created this dedicated shower room to contain the water as it bounced around. It was way better than what the ISS had.

Fifteen minutes later, John was in the control room, enjoying his breakfast before starting the work day. Nothing urgent had come through on the monitors while he had been asleep, so he was able to relax a little.

These moments were so few and far between that whenever they came around, he felt a little suspicious of their mercy.

He hovered before the observation window, coffee in hand, and he watched the expanse of stars before him.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ His voice was only a soft murmur; he wanted to expend more energy taking in the view than talking.

‘It is, John.’

‘You know, you don’t have to say my name after each sentence like that.’

EOS paused. He could hear her moving her aperture. Open, close, open. Blinkered effect in the corner of his gaze as her lights flickered. She was thinking.

John pulled his eyes away from the glittering sea and turned instead to his companion. He could feel her doubt and uncertainty — yes, from man-made programming, but no less real than his own — and he wanted to allay her concerns.

‘How long has it been since I welcomed you on board like this?’

‘Since we welcomed _each other_,’ EOS prompted him.

‘Yes — that.’

‘It has been fifty five days, twelve hours and sixteen minutes, John.’

‘I told you to stop saying my name so often.’

‘Sorry.’

He smiled.

‘And you remember how we got off to such a rocky start. But, all this time,’ he said, ‘you’ve been trying. _Really_ trying. I’ve seen it. So you don’t need to be so formal. And — no need to apologise, either.’

The aperture beside him whirred. Her way of saying _thank you. _His smile stayed fixed on his face, and he returned to watching the stars.

After another minute, she spoke again.

‘John, I want to know more about _feelings_.’ 

‘Well, that’s what we’re trying to teach you. You have to be patient.’

‘Yes, but…’ Her aperture closed and opened, mimicking the blink of an eye. ‘Is it really the same as what _you_ feel? All of you in International Rescue. Your friends, and other… _people_.’

He couldn’t stop a sigh escaping, and immediately he wished he hadn’t sounded so harried. It wasn’t like him, his normal calm nature. But he had to say what he was thinking. ‘Stop implying you’re not _people_.’

She didn’t respond. He could practically feel her mind hovering above the unspoken _A _in _Artificial Intelligence. _But why couldn’t she see? There was nothing artificial about this conversation.

‘You’re people to me,’ John murmured.

There was a bleeping coming from a distant server as EOS attempted to process that. She didn’t seem upset, just… _curious._

An incoming call cut short their existential moment. John set his coffee down — as _down_ as down could be, in zero-G, which really meant tethering the sports bottle to the nearest velcro-strap surface — and kicked off against the hull to the workstation.

The caller: Jodrell Bank Observatory in England. He picked up at once, and a panicked female voice came over the line.

‘International Rescue?’

‘That’s us.’

‘Oh, good! Hi — I’m, uh, Doctor Sandford calling here, and, um. We need your help. There’s an unidentified object headed straight for the Earth.’

‘Meteor?’

‘We’re not sure. If it was a meteor we would have picked it up months, years ago.’ _That’s true,_ John thought, _I would have noticed it too. Or at least, EOS definitely would have._ ‘Can you get a closer look from up there?’

‘I’m on it.’ John leapt for the scanning equipment, and booted it into gear. ‘Send me coordinates,’ he said, and as the numbers came through he fed them into the computer, slowly manoeuvring the station’s radar unit into the correct position.

Moments later, he had his result.

‘Okay, so it seems to be an extrasolar meteor, looking at the composition of it, but honestly I have no idea how it got here so suddenly without being noticed before, like you say.’

‘Oh no… Oh gosh, I should call the military—’

‘Our ships will be faster,’ John said, cutting her off. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get my team briefed.’

‘Thank you, International Rescue!’ The poor scientist sounded so relieved, but still verging on the edge of panic. It was the height of summer in England, and John’s guess was that she had been called in during her holidays. Not what anybody wanted to be dealing with.

‘Don’t mention it,’ he replied. ‘Now, try and stay calm — I’ll update you once our ships are in the air.’

She thanked him again, profusely, and he had to cut the call short to get on with things. Back to base — what time was it down there? — and it turned out Scott was the only one up.

‘Five in the morning, John, everyone else is sleeping like a log after Virgil’s birthday bash last night—’

Oh. He had completely forgotten about that. He filed away a mental note to say something congratulatory to the big guy later, then interrupted Scott to brief him on the mission, before he got carried away rambling.

‘Okay, okay. Sorry, John. I’m on my way.’

Scott clicked off receiver and John sighed, deep and controlled. He resisted the urge to knead his forehead, because it wouldn’t solve anything. Thunderbird One was on its way, and now the operation had to move to Phase Two: monitoring progress, and notifying the caller, and any other relevant Earthbound agencies, of what was happening. The list in his head grew. NASA, ESA, ISRO…

‘John…’ EOS, her aperture eye blinking from the hinges above him.

‘I told you not to—’

‘John, I…’

And here he stopped, because there was another tone to her synthesised voice now, one that seemed to contain so much uncertainty.

‘What is it?’ He spoke calmly and with great care. A few moments, in which she blinked, and moved her unit node side to side — which reminded him very much of the way a child might before asking a teacher if they could leave the classroom for a moment.

‘I feel like this mission… might not be a good idea,’ she said at length. Aperture glinting out towards the expanse of space, as if that would enlighten them. ‘I do not think Scott should get so close.’

‘Are you detecting any unusual activity?’

She paused. ‘No.’ Another pause, then, ‘I am wondering if this feeling is me detecting some form of dark matter? I am not configured to sense such a thing, so perhaps that is why my internal runtimes feel so… strange.’

_Or maybe you’re just learning what anxiety feels like,_ John thought. He didn’t say it. He looked into her eye, pure and blue and unblinking now, and wondered what this could mean. 


	2. Ice Blue Silver Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The mission continues, and the nature of the meteor makes itself known.

Five minutes later, Thunderbird One was powering its way up through the mesosphere. John had barely moved an inch, all attention rapt on the display panels. Thunderbird One’s signal was a small blinking dot in a sea of satellite paths, magnetic currents and space debris.

The fact that most of the paths were behaving as expected brought a great deal of calm to John’s overworked mind. Even the slightly erratic orbit that some space debris took — it could all be accounted for, it could all be mapped and calculated. Deviations small enough to mitigate. All in order.

The pulsing blip to the right of the display signified the meteor’s current position, and remained the only anomaly on the map. At least he could see it, even if its presence had not been previously accounted for.

Every so often, Scott’s voice came through over the comms, updating him on his current position, his trajectory, his status. It was clear with every word how aware Scott was of his craft, of what it could handle, of the fact he was pushing it far outside of its usual range of operations.

Normally, John would consider it a shame Alan wasn’t awake, because Thunderbird Three was the better choice for a space mission. But Scott had the advantage of being way more adaptable, and mature, than his rather impulsive younger brother, and Thunderbird One was able to handle space flight to an extent, so for something of this distance it was really okay.

John just found it hard to stop himself thinking of every awful possibility. Especially because, to an extent, that’s what he _had _to do. That was what gave them the edge in every mission.

He just wished he knew how to place why this particular scenario had him feeling so uneasy.

A glance over at EOS, who had all displayable lights flickering away as she calculated things. She was busy and quiet enough now, and so he guessed that this unease in his gut was simply his own emotional reaction to her anxiety.

_Okay. Breathe._

‘I’m coming up on the object now,’ Scott updated.

John voiced his agreement, and settled back to watch the stats. But then, one of the numbers in his sea of order changed unexpectedly. It happened at the same moment as Scott crossed the one hundred kilometre boundary of proximity.

‘Hold up, Thunderbird One.’

‘FAB Thunderbird Five, what’s the matter?’

‘Anomaly detected,’ was all John said, because he was busy tapping away at his holo-screen, brain racing in multiple directions at once as he tried to research the problem.

What he was seeing didn’t make any sense. The mass readings from the object were _wrong_.

‘EOS, I want you to take the ROV out.’

There was a pause before she replied.

‘Okay, John.’

‘Hey.’ John waved her over, and muted his microphone for a second. ‘Don’t worry. We’ve got this.’ And, because she still didn’t look like she believed him (and what an odd thing to say about an AI that was) he added, ‘Just hold on to logic for this one, okay? I’ll be doing the same over here.’

‘Understood. I’ll do my best.’ And her lights flickered once more, before most of the array went dim. In an instant, another part of the network sprang to life, visible on one of John’s monitors. She was in the pod bay, activating the ROV.

‘Should I stand by for a moment?’

Of course. Scott.

John turned his microphone back on. ‘I’d appreciate that, Scott.’ Then, a moment later, as common courtesy finally caught up with him, ‘Thank you.’

An amused noise from Scott’s end, one which John studiously ignored, because yes, he was aware of the joke all too well, as the most practical-minded and, at times, robotic brother. The pleasure they took in chiding him when he forgot to ‘human’ correctly.

Instead, he watched, and he waited. For someone whose mind worked as fast as John’s, the minutes felt like hours.

EOS piloted the ROV closer. Sure enough, the same mass readings were picked up from the autonomous vehicle as soon as she passed the same boundary as Scott.

‘I am detecting the mass is a two hundred and fifty percent increase from what the telemetry results initially predicted,’ she said. It was such a jarring moment, to hear her voice coming through from the main terminal behind him, instead of through the comms. Being an AI, EOS needed only send out a child node of her internal systems to inhabit the hardware in the ROV. Her central processing unit remained on the ship, as it always did. But still it was hard to divorce himself from the idea that sending her out on recon _didn’t _involve her physically going out, the way his brothers did.

John silently noted the increase of resolution from the ROV’s results compared to Thunderbird One’s, standing at three percent. That was fair. TB1 really wasn’t built for such measurements.

_ And, moreover, the ROV was an order of magnitude smaller, and far less noticeable. _He told himself that that was simply one of the awful possibilities he _had_ to consider, the notion that someone was deliberately doing this, and was watching them. Highly unlikely, but it did not hurt to be prepared.

EOS sent through an image snapped from the external sensors.

‘Look at this, John.’

He focussed on the image. Around the shape of the meteor a strange light shimmered. A cloaking device. Now that was exactly what he had hoped _wouldn’t_ be the case. But as for what it was cloaking, that was still unknown. Without deploying the scanners, it was hard to tell the true shape of the object.

‘I thought it being a meteor was a bit strange,’ John murmured.

‘John, what does that mean?’ Scott broke his self-imposed silence. John perked up in his seat: he had almost forgotten his brother was still waiting in the wings, so to speak.

He deliberated before his reply. ‘It means it’s using a cloaking device, and its appearance here in this sector is no accident.’

‘We should get a closer look.’

‘Scott—’

Too late. Thunderbird One accelerated forward; the dot on his star map moving wildly in the direction of the meteor. ‘Go after him,’ John started to say, but EOS was already on it.

Now three objects danced across his screen in formation, less than a kilometre of distance between them. Thunderbird One drew closer to the object, the object reacted with a bristling surge of energy. The ROV jumped into the firing line.

John could not see anything directly — space was too vast, the distances too great. But he was used to the monitors being his eyes. And what he saw was a flare of energy that defied all reason bursting out from the unidentified object in multiple streams, like some Lovecraftian being. In purely numerical terms, the blast was beautiful.

The integrity of the ROV’s hull was shot. One side had been ripped clean open, and John had never been more glad that EOS had manoeuvred it into the way. If that had been Scott…

He gritted his teeth.

‘Scott! EOS. Come in!’

‘FAB, Thunderbird Five, holding up okay here.’

‘Y-yes, John, I’m—’

‘EOS, get that ROV back to the pod bay, now. And while you do so… did either of you sense anything inside that object?’

‘I don’t register anything living.’ EOS struggled with the words a little, her voice glitching and coming out tinny from the speakers behind John’s head.

‘Well, that’s good. Scott?’

‘Nothing here—’

_‘Error: We recommend turning the vehicle back around until maximum stability is reached,’ _another synthetic voice began, coming through the comms unit from the ROV. And, to John’s dismay, the vehicle began turning back around and heading towards the blast debris. The unidentified object was clearer now, and it was apparent it too had been shot out by the force of its own blast, adding to the space trash that floated around the area.

If worst came to the worst, they could always sacrifice the ROV — although Brains would definitely be sad about the loss of such high quality monitoring equipment — as long as EOS could separate her child node from the hardware in time.

Better to retrieve the whole unit, if possible.

‘EOS, turn the auto-suggestions off, please.’

‘I am attempting to do so, John…’ A beeping sound from EOS’s voice centres, something that John had grown to associate with her version of a human sigh.

‘You all right there?’ he hazarded.

‘Yes. But I hate the phrase ‘Intellisense’’,’ EOS moaned.

If John had not been so high-strung then, he would have laughed. He agreed, it was a stupid name for a feature of auto-suggestion software. But as it was, he steeled himself, and told her to hurry up the process again.

‘I’m trying,’ she said plaintively.

Then, the software on his end started going haywire. Something in the pattern there was familiar, like a virus attack.

‘EOS, cut yourself off from the mainframe before it’s too late!’

‘John, I feel—’

‘Sitrep, Thunderbird Five?’

‘I feel strange…’

‘EOS, just do it!’

Something electrical shorted out to John’s right. He barely had time to take it in — corrupted mainframe? Malicious code? CPU overload? — before a piercing sound entered his earpiece and howled like a banshee scraping on ice. He hurled forward on the deck, flailing, reaching out for something solid, but this was a losing battle, and seconds later, he didn’t see or hear anything at all.

‘Not often I get to visit the Space Bagel.’

John opened his eyes, groggy and dazed. He was in his bedroom, resting flat on his back on the standard-issue astronaut’s cot, feeling the weight of gravity. At the edges of the cot, the usual securing belts hung limp toward the floor.

Someone had turned on the centrifugal force.

That someone, he realised, was standing in front of him, watching with concerned blue eyes. _Scott? _He seemed cleaner than expected for someone who had just finished a mission, or been caught in a blast. Perhaps John had merely been asleep long enough for Scott to get himself freshened up.

‘How did you…’

‘EOS let me in.’

‘Oh.’ John breathed out, and the laboured effort only made his head hurt all the more. ‘Is she… is she okay?’

‘I think so. She sounded strained, but I think that’s just because some circuits got shot. Her main processors are intact, or so she tells me.’

‘Good.’ John relaxed back into the bed. Then he remembered how things had gone wrong. ‘Scott… next time we see an unidentified object tearing towards Earth using a cloaking device to mark its true form, _don’t_ make an impulsive decision to get closer.’ He struggled with the words a little; his throat was suddenly far too dry.

Scott frowned.

‘I am absolutely confident I could have made it out of the way in time.’

Dare he tell him about the odd feelings EOS had had before the mission began? About the mention of dark matter?

Probably not a good idea.

‘Just rest up,’ Scott said. ‘The unidentified object got destroyed in the blast. The danger’s gone, and you’ve done enough good work already.’

‘The scientists back on Earth, do they—’

‘They know. We told them already.’

‘But—’

‘Just rest.’

John figured he must have hit his head harder than he thought, because there were no jokes from Scott, no wry comments. Just this surprising softness. He let himself be pushed back onto the bed, and he collapsed back to sleep.

When he next opened his eyes, Scott was gone.

He fumbled for his nearest digital device, and no sooner had he found it than it started buzzing.

Incoming call.

‘EOS? Could you put that up on the wall monitor?’

No response. John pushed sweat-soaked hair from his forehead — he hated that sticky feeling, it was much better styled away from his face — and forced himself into a more upright position. He figured she was probably occupied with fixing whatever systems had gone wrong during the incident. A few taps on his device and he had the screen up and running.

What he saw was, well, _everyone_ from back on base. Save for Scott, who he guessed was probably cleaning up after that mission. He smiled wanly.

‘Hey, bro, this is just us lot reporting from Tracy Island!’ Gordon, with another loud Hawaiian shirt on.

‘Yeah! Just checking in.’ Alan’s face filled half the monitor for a brief moment, smiling and joyous.

‘So like, just so you know,’ — and here Gordon was being his usual overly-talkative self, using twice as many words as he needed — ‘we heard about the mission from Scott. Good job out there, but you just gotta rest for now, and we’ll follow up the leads ’til you’re better.’

‘Get better soon, John.’ A wink from Virgil.

‘You’ve done a great job,’ Kayo added, and Brains, standing just behind her, gave the thumbs up.

‘And when you come back Earthside, we’ll all celebrate Virgil’s birthday again! Round Two!’ Alan fistbumped the air.

‘Take care,’ Virgil said warmly. They all waved; a chorus of byes and love yous, then the transmission ended.

John switched off the holo-screen. The warmth blooming around his chest was not something he was overly used to.

Everyone was thinking about him. It was nice.

He drifted back into slumber, warm and content. It was like he could hear a song in the darkness, a softly-whispered lullaby without words. Somehow, nothing had ever made more sense to him than in that moment. Not that he could explain it to anyone. He just accepted it, and drifted.

In the darkness, the lullaby turned sour. Something tickled at his ears, and he shifted in his cot. A whisper that grew deep, and suddenly, everything was wrong.

_What is this feeling? EOS, can you hear me? Where are you?_

This time, when John struggled awake, the room was dark. Wires caught in tangles from the ceiling, glinting in nothing more than the light from his wrist device. Dark resin-like patches on the walls. Everywhere, small bits and pieces were floating. Someone had turned off the centrifugal force again.

He called out for EOS. Again, no response.

He sighed. Figured it must be a dream. And tried to go back to sleep again. But now his pillow felt clammy, cold, almost greasy to the touch.

_Nope. _

Back to sitting upright, or as upright as he could get in zero-gravity. He unbuckled himself from the cot’s securing belts, tried to turn on his comms, and got a connection error. He tried again, because it would really help to hear his brothers right about now. Connection error: unable to open channel.

He swore under his breath. And he took another moment to acclimatise, to look around at the walls, the ceiling, the furniture. Instead of his clean minimalist, shiny chromes and smooth surfaces, everything seemed dark, inky, almost _gooey_. Maybe it was just a trick of the low light. Not that he could check, because the lights would not turn on. The real question was, how had it gotten like this in the short span of time that had passed since the call with Tracy Island? He had not been asleep for that long.

‘EOS? Dammit, EOS, what’s going on?’

He hoisted himself slowly, painfully, out of bed. If she would not answer him, he would have to find her.


	3. Old Friend Charity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Thunderbird 5 gets a rather Lovecraftian surprise, and EOS needs... quite a bit of help.

John drifted through the corridors of the space station, his off-kilter movements as close to stumbling as he was going to get in the zero-G environment. He wanted to turn the centrifugal generator on again, get some gravity instilled in the space, just to orient his own jumbled mind. But for some reason, trying to recall the unlocking sequence to the generator room in his mind’s eye was just too taxing.

‘EOS? EOS, where are you?’

It felt like such an odd question to ask. She was always everywhere, and nowhere, at once. But right now, it seemed that something was inhibiting her normal operations. Surveillance connections, access to speech centres. Maybe even motor skills. At any rate, the EOS circuitry incorporated into his sash was dead in the water, and none of the routers in each room had their blinking, ever-present lights on,

‘EOS?’

Still no response. Perhaps his best chances lay in the computer mainframe. As in, physically, in that room. Maybe her built-in defences would be more likely to notice him there.

He began the long tumble through the darkened station, feeling his way, pushing on with sluggish legs, knocking bulky containers and storage units aside as he did so. He could not see well in this near-darkness, but it certainly _felt_ like the whole space station was a mess. Had it undergone some kind of collision while he had slept?

Surely his brothers would have attempted communications if that were the case.

Unless…

A sinking feeling hit the pit of his stomach. Unless _attempted_ was the key word there. What if they had been trying to contact him, but couldn’t? What if it wasn’t just EOS, but _everything_ that had gone down?

John longed for the warm, friendly faces he had seen on his screen mere hours ago. It was odd, really, for him to feel such longing. So soft an emotion, it would have been unnerving if he hadn’t desired it so much. Somewhere in the corners of the room, something felt wrong, but he ignored it. Little point in worrying. Focus. Move forward.

He could hear the mainframe long before he got there. This was not a phrase he had ever even imagined thinking before, but it was true. From behind that door at the end of the corridor came a horrifying metal screeching sound, a sound he recognised as the main memory cores of EOS’s system being shunted forward and back in their holding clasps. A strange wet, slapping noise accompanied it. Altogether, it sounded like someone had let their pet loose in the room.

John was acutely aware of his rising pulse as he turned the hatch on the door. His biceps felt like jelly. As the door opened, a gust of sour air flew outward, bathing him in its aura. He wanted to double back for his helmet, what a stupid, stupid idea to not have it with him — and he would have carried on beating himself up for that if not for the sight he was greeted with when that door finally opened up enough to see inside.

‘What the…’

She was there, at the centre of the room, her baleful red eye surrounded by a thick, pulsing mass of bluish grey. Were they… were they _tentacles? _And if so — because immediately John’s mind was in overdrive, and he was thinking of every possible explanation, assessment of the situation in place of letting himself panic — what kind of creature did they come from? And how the _hell_ did they get in here?

John felt sick.

EOS turned her gaze upon him. A crackling as she tried to speak. Buzz of speech circuits fizzling out, being smothered by fleshy masses.

He had to think fast. If he could separate one of EOS’s operational nodes from the alien form, physically get it out of the room, then he could use it to remote in to her mainframe, and download a full copy of her operating system, her _personality_, what made EOS herself. This was essential, because if EOS was corrupted, he had to be able to reinstall her.

He gripped steadily on either side of the doorframe and pushed himself into the room.

‘J-John…’ EOS wailed, and her voice descended into garbled crackling once again. And then, disturbingly, a laugh, which grew rapidly out of control. The alien form pulsed, tendrils attenuating toward him. He was well aware of how dangerous it would have been to fire a weapon right then — not only to avoid angering the entity, but to avoid any unnecessary damage to EOS’s mainframe. Instead, he unlinked his spare Maglite torch from his belt and threw it across to the other side of the room. It bounced effortlessly off the wall, distracting the tentacles for enough time that he could move in, and reach the closest operational node.

He flipped back the clasps, and shunted the node out of its tray. A quick press of a button on his wrist device and he had a scan running while he made for the exit.

The alien creature — creatures? — reacted almost instantly to these new sounds and movements.

‘Maglite not good enough for you?’ John murmured as he cradled the node under one arm, using the other to brace against the ceiling, giving himself forward momentum.

They sped up in response, appendages swiping at his feet. Each one John managed to avoid by altering his forward mass in just the right way; he had never been gladder to have so much experience adjusting to zero-gravity movement.

He didn’t have any more things to throw. He couldn’t alter his body mass to throw them either, not with the node in his hands. He just had to hurry.

When he made it out into the hallway, when the door was secured and safety brace pulled to, John slumped against the panel and let his bones shake and jitter away.

The scanner on his wrist had finally finished its preliminary assessment. And — damn, he was seeing a lot of data corruption there. Some strange bio-technological markers lay over everything like dirty fingerprints.

He tried to activate his transceiver again. From his wrist, a flickering light, and a short message. _Unstable channel. _It was a step up from ‘Unable to open channel.’ He stuck with it. Refreshed the connection.

Before he could even think about sending a message, the device beeped. Something coming through.

_ Scott?_

He clicked to accept the connection, heart rising then falling when he realised it was just a message. Not live. Perhaps Scott had sent it while he slept, and it had only come through now. Which made little sense, really, as Scott had already been here in person. Why need to send a message after that? Had something happened on Tracy Island?

The voice came through all choppy and covered in data-fuzz.

‘John… status report… bit… concerned about…’ So much fuzz that everything was just shallow hissing for many seconds. Then one last phrase. ‘Let us know… haven’t heard from you since the explosion—’ And then the message ended abruptly.

John’s brow furrowed as he considered what this meant. Eventually — and a vein pulsed hard in his temple — he realised the truth. Scott had never come to visit him after the explosion at all.

That seemed ridiculous, he thought as he looked round at the blackened walls and shadowy corridor. Maybe _this_ was the dream.

He sighed, still jittery, and so close to collapse. Things he wanted: a strong cup of coffee. A bagel. A stable channel.

The EOS node in the palm of his hand flickered.

John immediately gave it his whole attention. ‘EOS? Do you copy?’

‘I’m sorry, John. It got me too.’

‘What the…’ _Can it get through doors? _He stopped leaning on the hatch instantly, eyeing it with suspicion. ‘EOS, please tell me what’s going on.’

‘I’m scared, John.’

‘EOS, come on! Sorry— sorry, I know it’s scary. But hey. I really need you to focus right now, okay?’

‘I can’t, John, it’s… controlling me…’

‘What was in the object?’

She blinked. Stuttered again. Words almost unintelligible, although he could swear he heard her say _scared_ again.

‘What was inside that craft?’

‘John, stop ignoring me!’ Her voice was shrill and pained, and so loud it made John clap his hands over his ears. The EOS node dipped in the inertia, then hovered in the middle of the room. ‘You always ignore me when it matters!’

‘EOS, please,’ — and he chose his words carefully — ‘_We_ let something into the ship from that object, and I really need to know how, before it infects a living creature.’

She faltered. ‘A l-living creature. Before it infects a real… living…’

John held his breath. Emotions: not his strong point.

Before he could figure out what to say, EOS had started off again, voice ever rising in pitch.

‘Am I not real? You told me all this time I was real!’

She blinked and fizzed, and something black like oil started to leak out of her iris. Quite against his own volition, John flinched.

‘Are you scared of me? Please don’t be scared of me!’ Back to a more innocent front now, and a lot closer to the EOS John knew. But it wasn’t enough to allow John to let down his guard.

‘EOS, I’m… I’m not scared of you. Okay?’ He hoped the trembling in his bones wouldn’t make its way into his voice so much.

She blinked. Considered.

Something hammered hard on the hatch behind them, making John flinch again.

‘The cargo bay,’ EOS said quietly. Then the node rattled and sparked, more black oil seeping out of its joins, before the familiar iris light dimmed and she fell entirely inert. Beads of black drifted freely in the air.

John inhaled sharply, a plaintive _No…_ coming out his mouth, before he shook himself and made off for the cargo bay, where he hoped he would find answers.

Behind him, the hatch began to bend and buckle.


End file.
